Lecture X Jack London (1876-1916)

Jack London was an American novelist and short-story writer, whose work combined high adventure, socialism and mysticism. Strikingly handsome, full of laughter, restless and courageous to a fault, always eager for adventure on land or sea, he was one of the most attractive and romantic figures of his time, and filled his work with exciting experiences from his own life.

He was born in San Francisco, California, and spent his childhood on the water-front of San Francisco Bay, mostly among the docks and ships of the city of Oakland. He never saw his real father. His mother and stepfather were poor, so Jack sold newspapers and worked in a bowling alley, in a cannery, and on an ice wagon to help support the family.

When he was ten he discovered books. He liked sea stories best, and longed to go to sea. He bought a sloop when he was 15, and started stealing from the oyster beds in the day and at night. At 17 he became a sailor on a ship hunting seals in the North Pacific.

His time aboard the ship made London restless, and shortly after his return he wandered across the United States, riding freight trains and begging for food. He was arrested by the police at Niagara Falls, New York, for vagrancy, and was sentenced to 30 days of hard labour.

When he was 19 he returned to Oakland to enter high school. He studied almost 19 hours a day and worked as a school janitor, too. He finished 4 years of work in one year. In his spare time, he attempted to further his education by reading the works of Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx, Rudyard Kipling, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others. He became interested in socialism. As he explained later, this was because in his poor childhood he had seen “the cellar of society… the pit, the abyss, the human cesspool…”. London began to study at the University of California at Berkeley, but left to join the Klondike gold rush of 1898 for a quick fortune in Alaska. He returned to San Francisco penniless, but with a wealth of memories which provided the raw material for his first stories. Until his first writing success at twenty-four his life was one vicious, downward cycle of toil, escape, toil, escape, toil. He became a "work beast" labouring in a cannery, jute mill, laundry, and shoveling coal in a power station. He worked for ten cents an hour, thirteen to fourteen hours a day, six and seven days a week. That’s why he saw life in terms of man's unending struggle against a ruthless nature.

London’s Creative Work

He ascribed his literary success largely to hard work. He was an extremely disciplined craftsman and tried never to miss his early morning 1,000-word writing stint, and between 1900 and 1916 he completed over fifty books, including both fiction and non-fiction, hundreds of short stories, and numerous articles on a wide range of topics. Several of the novels and many of the short stories, particularly

“The Sea Wolf” (1904), “White Fang” (1906), “To Build a Fire” (1907), “The Iron Heel” (1908), “Martin Eden” (1909), “The Call of the Wild” (1903) and “Love of Life” (1905) are considered classics in American literature and often are compared with the works of Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling, well thought of in critical terms and still popular around the world. Today, almost countless editions of his writings are available and some of them have been translated into as many as seventy different languages. In fact, he was a prolific writer whose fiction explored three geographies and their cultures: the Yukon, California, and the South Pacific. He experimented with many literary forms, from conventional love stories and dystopias to science fantasy. He wrote passionately about the great questions of life and death, the struggle to survive with dignity and integrity, and he wove these elemental ideas into stories of high adventure based on his own firsthand experiences at sea, or in Alaska, or in the fields and factories of California. As a result, his writing appealed not to the few, but to millions of people all around the world. His innovative, simple style, descriptive skill, and adherence to the principles of realism and naturalism laid the ground-work for such later writers as Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner and Ernest Hemingway.

London claimed that he didn’t like to write, but did so to make money. He became the highest-paid writer of his day, earning more than a million dollars. During his last years, London purchased ideas for stories from other writers when his own imagination failed him. Ill health led to London’s premature death at the age of 40 which, it is widely believed, was by suicide.

Jack London like other poets and novelists of his time sought to record the things how they really were. He was dissatisfied with the books that were popular in his days. He became a pioneer of a new kind of realism, not the quiet, photographic realism or a crude and brutal kind that often depicted violence, but a poetical, romantic realism. His realism wasn’t based on everyday plausibility; on the contrary, it was animated by romanticism, which towered the reader above daily routine.

London had a genius for narrative. The secret of emotional influence of his stories lies in the peculiarity of his methods of writing - striving for showing a man in hard minutes of life.

In his North stories people become firmly established because of their energy, quick wit and courage. He is attracted by outstanding persons, and harsh conditions of wild North give them an opportunity to reveal their strong and weak points. Lyric hero is quite often endangered, confronted with mortal danger. The writer makes a contrast between simple-minded, austere, responsive and unselfish heroes, who have gone to these wild lands in chase of gold, and factitious heroes of America. For his heroes gold is important, but it isn’t the meaning of their lives. Courage, fortitude, honesty and nobility - are the most important things for London.

LECTURE XI